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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T00:36:54+00:00

I am running a Rails app on the AWS infrastructure using several EC2 instances,

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I am running a Rails app on the AWS infrastructure using several EC2 instances, a RDS DB, a round robin session-sticky load balancer and Route 53.

The application is serving pages for several domain names (same app looks and functions different depending on domain name).

The Rails code is hosted on a NFS share on a staging instance where the web server is running in development mode, while the other boxes load the apache config and application code via NFS and run in production mode.

What I’d like to do is to SSL-enable the whole thing as we’re starting to process payments and whatnot. Due to the nature of the application and the heavy apache/Passenger optimization in place, I can’t set up a vhost for each domain, but rather use a wildcard for www.* to load pretty much the same code, and the app does the rest internally.

Haven’t really been able to figure out an ideal way to resolve this. Would anyone have an idea?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After a bit of discussion in the comments we came to this conclusion:

    The application is currently hosted in one single <vhost> on Apache where the Application does the differentiation between hostnames for the different layouts.

    The problem here is to support SSL without having to setup each domain with it’s own certificate and a different vhost as that would require running the Rails app multiple times where it’s unnecessary.

    By using a Multiple Domain Certificate (MDC) this problem can be solved with only one vhost and one certificate, but MDCs are more expensive than normal certificates. So depending on the number of domains you need to support it may be cheaper/easier to just do it manually with multiple certs, or opt to pay the more expensive MDC but save time and maintenance cost.

    While at it I found this nice wikipedia comparison of Certificate Authorities and their trust level in different browsers:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_SSL_certificates_for_web_servers

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